Monica Eng, the Tribune’s tireless watchdog of the school lunch trainwreck/beat, and Joel Hood have another expose of school lunches today, focusing this time not on lousy nutrition but on lousy accountability. Basically, everybody and his dog knows how to game the system to get a free school lunch, so “the percentage of students receiving free lunches was at least 20 percentage points higher than the percentage enrolled in the country’s two primary aid programs.” You will be shocked, shocked to learn that the system is actually designed to spend more, because “School districts reap rewards for enrolling as many students as possible in the lunch program, in part because those numbers help determine funding tied to poverty levels. At the same time, federal law allows school officials to vet only a fraction of the lunch applications they receive — in the case of CPS, fewer than 1 percent.” Their conclusion is blunt: “the government has created an $11 billion program conducted largely on the honor system, and one that appears to reward everyone except taxpayers.” [Tribune]
